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Amazon Measures

Over the last decade, recognition of the need for WCS to develop a set of standard measures of conservation action and conservation impact across its field-based (landscape) programs has increased. On the one hand these measures should be able to clearly demonstrate WCS´s impact at a given site and should be able to contribute to the monitoring programs of the individual landscapes or programs. Perhaps more importantly, WCS as an institution needs to be able to demonstrate overall impacts in the conservation arena to a series of key audiences. Aside from anything else, as conservation grows as both a science and an art, the general demand for being able to demonstrate success is understandably growing.

In response to this demand, and as part of an overall strategic review including a new strategy, participating countries from Wildlife Conservation Society’s Amazon Program developed a set of effort and impact measures for our landscape conservation actions that we believe show the depth and breadth of WCS work across the Amazon. The conservation action measures were also developed with institutional efficiency in mind, and as such we have deliberately focused on measures that should be relatively easy to systematize and compile on an annual basis.

Here we report the results of this retroactive analysis for the 31 measures identified in the following six landscapes: